Amazon EC2, Azure, Google Compute for web hosting

[Cary Gordon]

We use AWS for our infrastructure. After four years of watching, evaluating and testing, we migrated our data centers in 2011, and are very pleased with the results.

You may certainly host Wordpress or Omeka or any other internet-based software on AWS. Understand that AWS does not provide direct support for applications, but many folks do. I am also not a big fan of using paid of free application images, although some of them might offer support. We generally use AWS Linux — pretty much a well supported CentOS variant — for most projects. The latest version supports Docker, which we use.

AWS has a great suite of deployment and management tools.

We have become AWS Consulting Partners.

So to answer your questions:
We are currently using AWS paid support, but it would be a marginal value for limited use. It would be cheaper for you to have us host it, and we would offer more comprehensive support.
We manage a lot of servers and services, but we employ a lot of automated services including monitoring, testing and deployment, so the staff load is relatively low.
As I mentioned, these are not a great fit for us and result in too much platform sprawl.
Recommendations
Invest time in fully reading the documentation and training manuals, and creating test deployments.
Do not commit to a reservation until you are certain that you will fully use it on one hand, and not outgrow it in the reservation period. 
On the same point, use one year reservations for anything larger than the smallest servers as AWS has a (great) habit of offering new options that are usually faster and cheaper.
Use as much of the full suite as possible, including their Route53 DNS. This will make your system much more flexible in case you need to scale a service.
Alternatively, consider hiring us, We could manage your systems, train you, or both.
Thanks,

Cary

> On Jan 2, 2015, at 10:38 PM, Jim LeFager <jameslefager at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi, 
> 
> We are curious if anyone is using or planning to use Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, or Google Compute for any web hosting.  Specifically we are interested in anyone hosting Wordpress or Omeka on these services, but if you are hosting other projects on these we'd love to hear about them.  
> 
> A few questions we have: 
> 
> Are you using any of the built-in support packages that Amazon or Azure offer?
> How many staff or approximately how much staff time is dedicated to managing these services?
> Are you using Bitnami or a similar service to run Amazon Web Services?
> Any insights, recommendations, issues or experiences with using these services?
> Thanks, 
> 
> Jim LeFager
> Systems and Applications Librarian
> DePaul University
> JTR 213-B, DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus, 2350 N Kenmore Ave., Chicago IL 60614
> office: 773-325-3265 | Google Voice:  224-725-3786 |  jlefager at depaul.edu <mailto:jlefager at depaul.edu>============================
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> 2015-01-02
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